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UX design is the basis for why and how customers choose to interact and experience your brand. From a phone call to exploring your website, to how a live event is produced, UX design all plays a critical role in the overall brand experience. Here are 9 user experience strategies to improve the brand experience for your organization.

Definition of UX as it Relates to Brand Experience

The process of providing greater customer satisfaction and enhancing loyalty by making improvements to the ease of use, overall usability, and pleasure experienced by the customer.

1. User Research is Vital in UX

One of the most common pitfalls when it comes to entrepreneurs developing a product or service for their audience is the fact that they have not taken the time to understand what their audience actually wants. Designing a product or service in a vacuum can lead to a failed offering. Why?

Simply because the entrepreneur didn’t take the time to figure out what their potential customers want. User research is vital in user experience design. It serves as the basis for how and why a product or service is developed; to best serve the customer.

Build in a process to survey and have a beta test group of ideal users who can provide genuine feedback to you. This feedback loop will become essential to developing an experience customers want to interact with.

Remember, the user experience of your product/service/event will be imprinted into the brand experience. In other words, people will make the correlation between the experience they have interacting with your brand’s products and services with the overall impression of the brand. The two are very closely linked.

2. There is Not a Single Standard UX Process

While there may not be a unified body that can provide a rigid process to follow to develop an outstanding user experience design, one of the greatest aspects of UX is its flexibility.

Your brand and the experience you are offering are distinctive and unlike anything else. Embrace the UX design process to hone in on what makes your brand stand out. Take advantage of your brand’s uniqueness and let it shine through your user experience.

3. UX Design is a Combination of Best Practices Based on Research

With a background in design, one thing I know for certain is that design is made up of a combination of best practices based on proven research. What do I mean? If you look at architectural illustrations and start to break down the components that make up the artwork, what do you notice?

If you look at a series of architectural illustrations and start to break down the components that make up the artwork, what do you notice? You may start to see similar, if not the same objects appearing across multiple architectural renderings. You may start to notice a distinct style the artwork has and how each piece, while they may not be related, share similar aspects, objects, styles, and pieces to create a similar experience.

When you think of design a web experience, most often you start with researching what is most appealing and aligned with your brand. Then you want to survey your audience to determine if what you have chosen meets their needs as well. From there, it is an iterative, detailed process to develop a unique design and experience for your brand.

4. Attention to Detail Enhances the UX Brand Experience for the Customer

Detail matters.

Now more than ever. Across multiple online platforms, multiple mediums (print, video, audio, face to face, etc.) – details enhance the user experience and further help to develop a consistent brand experience for the customer.

When working with an online experience, small details such as an informative error message or a few descriptive words to make a process more transparent can make a significant difference to the user experience.

5. Offering a Variety of Choices Can Hinder the UX Design

When you allow this to take place, the user isn’t suddenly able to make the best decision. In fact, the opposite occurs. The user may suddenly feel overwhelmed, inundated with choices and information and a lack of understanding as to how to proceed.

By simplifying the choices and developing a transparent road map to guide the user from the starting point to the desired outcome, your brand experience not only puts the customer at ease but gives them a tangible way to follow along. A user is much more likely to get involved in a complicated process when they can see the big picture and evaluate each step along throughout the journey.

Accessibility through interfaces – long gone are the days when your brand may only have a website that can be accessed on a desktop/laptop only. In 2017, if your brand does not have the digital assets in place to provide an accessible, friendly user experience across multiple devices, there is a major flaw in how your brand is communicating to its’ audience.

Accessibility to information – this refers to account information a customer may have given to a brand. Think Domino’s Pizza, Starbucks, or even Facebook. Customers of these brands have agreed to sign up and provide their information to these brands. In return, they receive a physical product (pizza or coffee), or access to connect with others around the world. In doing so, the brand’s have allowed the customer to log in and access their information 24/7 without interruption (sans an internet outage).

Both of these types of accessibility play into the user experience and, on a larger level the brand experience.

7. Usability Testing is Fundamental to a Successful UX Design

The first strategy mentioned in this list was to include user feedback into the development of your user experience. Once you have developed the user experience for your product, service, event, or website, the next step is to have users test the experience and provide feedback. This is different from collecting information from users as you develop the experience.

Usability testing allows users to fully interact and engage with your product (i.e. membership site) and provide feedback as far as bugs, missing features, poor design, or missing functionality. By putting this component into your project timeline, it will help to iterate faster and get a product out to your audience that they will love that much more.

Allowing your best customers to provide feedback is also an experience in and of itself. By allowing them to peek behind the curtain, your brand builds trust, can feel more authentic, and create a deeper sense of appreciation for the brand. Plus, people like to feel helpful. If they can provide an insight that helps a brand develop a better product, they will be happy to share that story with others, which is free, positive exposure for the brand. A win-win!

Plus, people like to feel helpful. If they can provide an insight that helps a brand develop a better product, they will be happy to share that story with others, which is free, positive exposure for the brand. A win-win!

8. UX Plays a Role in Designing the Brand Experience

With the previous seven strategies, you may have noticed a theme. That theme is that UX design plays a big role in designing the brand experience. The two are intertwined, one not far off from the other. There is even some overlap, though both each has distinctive qualities.

How a brand is perceived is based, in part to how their product or service’s experience is delivered. If for example, you order from Amazon.com quite often, the overall brand experience will be perceived by how quickly Amazon is able to ship your orders to you.

Amazon’s brand experience is made up of its’ groundwork (vision, brand promise, mission, core values, and guiding principles), how it performs (usability of its’ site and shipping orders), and how its customers perceive the brand.

9. UX, Like Brand Experience, Should be Applied Across Your Organization

We know that the brand experience exists throughout your organization, in every internal and external interaction. UX design should be applied in the same manner. Internally, how do your employees interact with company resources? Is there a common intranet that everyone uses? Does one exist that no one uses? There may be an opportunity to redesign the intranet to develop a simple to use, easy to navigate user experience, which could spur more engagement, interaction, and brainstorms from your team members.

On top of that, your brand could study how employees interact with certain aspects of design on a site and compare that to how users/customers act with the same design. This could provide incredible insights into developing a UX design customized to your brand’s audience’s specific needs.

Enjoyed This Post? Share it With Others!

How do you use UX design to develop exceptional brand experiences? Where do you get stuck? Let me know in the comments or through social media.

Your brand promise is much more than what you consistently deliver to your customers. It is a strategic tool that helps determine the future direction of your company.

A brand promise is a strategic tool that communicates to customers what to expect when interacting with your product or services. In this post, we are going to look at how Amazon’s brand promise has become a strategic tool as they pursue new growth goals for their brand.

Amazon’s brand promise is to deliver the broadest selection of products and services at the lowest prices with minimal hassle. Over and over again, Amazon relentlessly reinforces that promise through the experiences of its hundreds of millions of customers who buy over 3.5 billion items each year.

Brand Promise Reinforces Company Direction

Amazon just recently announced that the brand will expand into ocean freight, marking the online retail giant’s latest effort to build out its delivery business. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon doesn’t own or operate ships, but is openly acting as a global freight forwarder and third-party logistics provider, categories of companies that book space on ocean vessels and truck goods between ports and warehouses.

In January 2017, Amazon began posting rates for new services such as sorting, labeling, and tracking shipments. These services are typically handled by traditional global freight companies. Going back to Amazon’s promise, the brand is seeking every way possible to deliver a broad selection of products and services to their customers with the least amount of hassle.

By expanding into ocean freight and leasing cargo planes and trucks, Amazon is laying the groundwork for its future plans to one day haul and deliver packages and cargo for others as well as itself. Amazon’s promise to its customers is guiding the strategy forward.

Moving Forward, Full Steam Ahead

Love them or not, Amazon is has a clear vision, promise, mission, and values that they live by. The brand is relentless in their pursuit to offer the broadest selection of products and services and deliver them to their customers with the least hassle. That promise has driven their brand loyalty and trust to the highest levels among online retailers and has provided strategic direction for the brand itself.

People trust Amazon. They know that when they make a purchase on Amazon, they will receive their order on time or before the estimated delivery date. That consistent delivery on the promise that they have upheld is what fuels Amazon’s brand trust and loayal customers.

Best Practices for a Meaningful Brand Promise

A brand promise should be simple, realistic, indicative, and actionable

No more than 10 words – choose words carefully and that have meaning across your brand

Make the promise measurable – tie the promise back to an objective that can be measured. This can then become as a litmus test to confirm, validate, and question the brand’s performance

What’s Your Take?

Do you agree that Amazon is continuing to expand based on their brand promise? How will Amazon improving their logistics and supply chain improve your experience and interaction with the brand? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Connect with me on Twitter or leave a comment below.

I’ve been writing a lot about artificial intelligence and how it is disrupting and changing the brand experience for consumers. Amazon just introduced a new grocery store concept that takes the brand experience of shopping to the next level. It has the potential to change how all physical retail shopping is operated in the future.

Amazon imagines the shopping experience to be seamless and “checkout free.” The company has just launched their own grocery store in Seattle, located at 2131 7th Ave. The name of the new grocery brand is Amazon Go. Currently limited to 1,800 square feet of retail space and only open to the company’s employees during the beta program, it is expected to open to the public in early 2017.

The Technology Behind the Brand Experience

Amazon is relentless when it comes to delivering on its brand promise of “consitently delivering an exceptional customer experience.” It has taken the steps necessary to push the envelope further in order to continue to deliver on their brand promise.

Amazon explains why they created Amazon Go:

Four years ago we asked ourselves: what if we could create a shopping experience with no lines and no checkout? Could we push the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning to create a store where customers could simply take what they want and go?

Our answer to those questions is Amazon Go and Just Walk Out Shopping.

According to the official FAQ page, the store and shelves are equipped with “computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.” Meaning, it can detect when products are remvoed and returned to the shelves. When you leave the store, you account is charged, presumably using facial-recognition technology.

How This Shopping Concept May Disrupt the Existing Shopping Experience

When I think of the existing physical shopping experience, it is a pretty dull experience. In my mind, it lacks connectivity. While you are able to see, touch, and hold physical products, you also lack information the internet is able to provide. With clothes or shoes, it is often the sizes. For me especially, shopping for cothes and shoes is mainly an online experience. Very few stores carry a wide variety of size 15 shoes, nor do they stock a 38″ inseam pants.

Revel Systems, a point-of-sales company that helps retailers with inventory, purchase orders, and analytics, recently released a report that revealed “64 percent of consumers think it’s important for physical retailers to have a strong online presence, and 93 percent say they research an item online before buying it in person at a store.“

While the Amazon Go store doesn’t solve my clothes-buying-in-person problem yet, it certainly eases other shopping frustrations, such as the check out line. It also feels faster as you can connect your app to the turnstile when you enter the store, get what you need, walk out of the store and keep going. The app sends you a receipt of your purchase. This seamless, more natural experience is welcome to an often frustrating, clunky checkout process. In fact, Amazon’s new technology platform could be modified to fit other retail store types. I’d look to see Amazon’s new book store concept adapt the technology if the beta test goes well.

The Future is Here

It feels like we are finally stepping into the future. Our technology is beginning to seamlessly integreate with our physical world, fusing the two together to create a new, hybrid brand experience. Amazon’s new shopping concept feels futuristic to me – I can’t wait to experience it!

What’s your take? Are you excited for this new shopping experience? Is technology going too far? Leave a comment below or connect with me on Twitter @BWarsinske. I’d love to hear your thoughts.